Using plasma alone is dysfunctional. Using it as part of KDE has been fine for years.

Well, I still miss being able to place launchers/applets wherever I want them on a panel or desktop without being forced into a grid or having to use spacers that never quite work right.

Suborbital rocket planes aren't developing significant relevant tech though. Progress will come from more efficient orbital rockets lowering in price, not from developing the plane-assisted suborbital rockets dead end that has no prospect of going orbital.

Columbia can invite Ahmadinejad to speak and that's okay even though he is a horrible dictator.

A "dictator" whose parliament was antagonistic towards him, who lost favor with his supreme leader and who left office in an election and failed to get his preferred successor into office. Regardless of whether he was horrible, he was clearly not a dictator in any sense.

No altitude would cause bouncing into space, only velocity can cause that. In theory, you could go well past the moon's orbit (as long as the moon was on the other side) and fall to Earth. You'd gain so much speed in the vacuum that you'd burn up on re-entry like the rest of the meteors.

Chromebooks are not primary computers, they're supplemental computers. Having full Windows is a disadvantage, the purpose is to be as dead simple and unbreakable as possible.

united the Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds in a fight against a common enemy

That's a nice universe you're living in. Back in this one, there's increasingly brutal revenge ethnic cleansing by Shiites and Kurds and a continual fracturing into disparate militias.

Sneaking across the USA-Africa border requires a very strong swimmer.

The money would likely not be held in evidence in the correct order.

If he genuinely has a working model, he'd certainly have no trouble getting a patent or defending it.

Aspiring future gas giant. Wait a few billion years.

If you make more than $34K a year, you're in the top 1% of world income.

How is opera based on chrome? I know it uses webkit, but webkit is apple's safari modifications to konqueror's khtml... certainly not a chrome-specific rendering engine. (Technically blink is, but it doesn't differ much from webkit yet.)

It's hard to imagine someone who can afford to buy a small aircraft but can't afford to rent a car at the airport.

Take off the tinfoil hat. Facebook knows you like cameras and printers from your techy profile, and you happened to look at popular ones.